Experience is marketing: Joe Pine and James Gilmore urge marketers to stop using conventional forms of advertising and to engage customers by staging brand experiences instead.(Brand Experience)

Imagine a bank branch like no other. Non-customers, even people who've never even heard of the bank, walk by and decide the place looks so inviting they can't help but drop in. When they do, they're offered some coffee to go, or if they'd prefer, to drink while lounging around, reading newspapers, accessing the internet, or talking with their friends. Moreover, in this bank, visitors pay for their coffee, tea, biscuits and items of memorabilia (mugs, pens, and hats). And not a single financial transaction occurs, for the bank provides no means of doing so. Yet that single branch yields around $200m (11m [pounds sterling]) in new accounts and mortgages within a year of opening.

Such a place actually exists: the ING Direct Cafe on 49th Street in New York. More a cafe than a branch, it was inspired by personnel in the Toronto offices of ING Direct--which has no physical branches, completing all transactions via mail, phone, and internet--who started serving coffee to the myriad people popping in to see what the company was like. The bank decided a cafe was a great way to entice new customers to walk in so financially savvy and friendly baristas could engage them in conversations about their financial needs and explain ING Direct's capabilities for saving accounts and mortgages.

Amazingly, it works. Customers literally turn …